"The post-capital dilemma in contemporary Rio de Janeiro: architecture and decadence in the Cidade Maravilhosa"

Speaker(s): Tom Winterbottom

This talk moves away from empirical and quantitative studies of Rio de Janeiro – a city firmly in the contemporary public eye – to a cultural analysis of the city. I take this presentation from part of a chapter of my doctoral dissertation that focuses on architecture, drawing primarily on two examples to show how architectural changes also reflect cultural and societal changes, opening our eyes to a more complex understanding of the city today. The immediate history of the transition of capital has been widely studied, but less so how it fits into a historical continuum that is again relevant as Rio prepares to host the ultimate global spectacle, the Olympics. Rio lost its institutional power in 1960 and subsequently entered a period of decline and decadence, making this current intersection intriguing as the city ostensibly re-emerges in preparation for the global events it will host. Through analyzing the history of two hotels – the Hotel Glória and the Copacabana Palace, both built in the 1920s – and the stories contained therein, I explore a period of Rio’s (architectural) history, spanning Art Deco, Modernism, and the post-1960 period, as well as the recent history of businessman Eike Batista and Olympic redevelopment. Ultimately, these two buildings highlight elements of Rio’s decadent history, a trait of the city that is, I argue, still very relevant in the city today and poses a significant challenge to the lofty development ambitions that are already beset by problems.  Symbolic Rio de Janeiro is today more potent than at any point in its history, and discourses surrounding the city underline its position in the urban and national imaginary as it aims to be, at once and fundamentally problematically, a symbol of the nation and a global city. Concretely, the stories of these buildings shed a fragment of light, I hope, onto this intrinsically complex moment in Rio.

Tom Winterbottom is a Ph. D. student at Stanford in the Iberian and Latin American Cultures department. His research focuses on the cultural study of urban centers, particularly in Brazil and Argentina. He is writing his dissertation on cultural representations of contemporary Rio de Janeiro and the effect of the Olympics.